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As minister, the formerly pro-carbon price Hunt had achieved the very policy aim he and Abbott had explicitly set course for. And he was duly thanked.

Yet there was a sense about the minister that he was already turning his mind to the fact that on his watch, Australia had just entered a policy hollow.

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It may have been simple exhaustion but Hunt's pallid countenance reminded one of the truism that sometimes at the instant of victory, the heart stands still.

Not Abbott's though.

Abbott is not torn over scrapping the carbon tax nor burying the emissions trading scheme it would have led to, believing both iterations to be a waste of money and removing them to behis best known promise.

''Useless and destructive,'' he called the policy.

More than anything else, Abbott's win in 2013 was built on the very foundations of Julia Gillard's carbon tax backflip, a fact no one can gainsay.

Yet for all the clarity on that point, it is also true that the election was fought on the common plinth of global warming as fact, and with a bipartisan commitment to Australia's minimum 5 per cent emission reduction target by 2020.

Now that is in doubt.

Hunt insists it can still be achieved through so-called ''direct action''. Few scientists and economists share his confidence. Besides, it relies on a Senate which is playing hard to get.

Tellingly, Abbott opened the batting for the next election by declaring that he would henceforth regard as completely synonymous, the idea of a carbon tax and a tradeable emissions permit market with the price influenced by a cap and set by demand.

In other words, Bill Shorten can propose whatever he likes because for Abbott, it will simply be a tax.

The battle lines are drawn.

Christopher Pyne magnified the intention in his own inimitable way bellowing to Shorten across the dispatch box in Parliament ''we will hang this around your neck like a rotten stinking carcass ... you have given us a whole new lease of life''.

Carbon politics, like the environmental damage they are supposed to address, are not going away any time soon.